Fawzia Mirza interview feature image by Mat Hayward/Getty Images for IMDb

Some artists don’t get to come out of nowhere. Some artists don’t get to make one short film that leads to a feature or write one script that gets enough buzz to get made. Some artists like Fawzia Mirza have to work in various roles across various mediums for years before their first feature hits theatres. While we can and should lament the inequities in the film industry, these years of work can also compound in ways that are positive. Because most artists don’t make something like The Queen of My Dreams.

With narrative ambition and formal precision, Mirza’s feature directorial debut The Queen of My Dreams is a special film. And now, nearly two years after its TIFF premiere, it’s finally out in theatres across the U.S. In anticipation of the film’s release, I talked to Mirza about their approach to color, the journey of getting the film made, and why the production was life-changing.

Drew: How did you create the film’s visual style? What were the conversations like with your DP and the rest of your crew, especially in terms of color?

Fawzia: I knew that I wanted the film to feel colorful, rich, and vibrant. That was always really important. I think what happens with places like Pakistan is it’s like oh it’s gritty and we have to show its struggle and the devastation. And when we’re looking at places like the town I used to live in Canada in Sydney, Nova Scotia it’s the same. The grit of the place, unemployment, let’s show people in struggle. And I just didn’t want to do any of that.

I mean, I’ve seen many films — some great, some not so great — that have done all of that. I wanted to show the vibrant world that I aspire for us all to live in. Even when things are really hard, we’re still living in vibrant worlds and there’s still hope. That was really important to me. And then, you know, I’m deeply impacted by Bollywood films. I say that really specifically because Bollywood being Hindi language films, musicals, big romance. That’s what I wanted to evoke in the movie and it was a big part of all the conversations from the beginning with producers, and in any interviews with production designers and DPs.

The DP who I hired, Matt Irwin, did such a phenomenal job. In order to find the color and so we were all speaking the same language with the visuals, he created a LUT beforehand which created a beautiful, vibrant image we could all see when we were looking at the camera. It’s basically something that makes it so when you’re looking in the camera you don’t just see raw footage. You see a vibrant world and what that did for us immediately is it wasn’t just a movie in my head, it wasn’t just a movie in the production designer’s head. Anybody could see the movie we were making. And there are so many people who that matters for. Not just department heads but everybody could be part of the story and, in particular, the color story which was really important.

That’s how we began and then eventually once we got to post and were moving through post-production we found five different looks for the film. You have the ’90s, you have the ’80s, you have the ’60s, and then you also have the fantasy sequences for the women in each era. Then the fifth look is the movie within the movie which has its own look that we really didn’t do anything to.

Drew: So you found those different color stories in post after having that base vibrancy during production?

Fawzia: In terms of tweaking them, yes. But the production design was also such a huge part of it. Our production designer Michael Pearson lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and if you can ever hire him, he should be hired. He’s a genius when it comes to color. Immediately in our interview, which is why I knew he was the person I wanted to hire, he was thinking about the props that needed to travel time and be in the different countries with us. And also he was thinking about color. The thing we latched onto from the beginning was the film within the film, Aradhana from 1969 starring Sharmila Tagore. In an iconic scene, she wears this blue sari, so from very early on we were like this blue color feels like the color of the fantasies. And also a color that ties us to the places we’re in. Karachi, Pakistan feels very far from Nova Scotia, Canada which is basically like Canadian Maine, but the blue, the ocean, ties us together. They’re both port cities. It ties us in this really grounded, calming, beautiful, real way. So that was really important, and then honestly there’s so much that brought us those colors. Like the tupperware of the ‘80s was a color palette. This very specific orange, yellow, brown, and green. Should you eat out of those? Probably not. But the colors are so iconic. Those were really grounding colors for us too. Then, you know, the ‘90s you have a bit more grunge added in and things are messier. And then the ‘60s we’re taking those same colors but they’re more romantic. Everything is more polished and romantic and sexy and in a lot of ways idylic. There’s a softness to it.

Drew: You’re talking about these different places and different time periods and I’m wondering if there was any hesitance either personally or from producers and financiers about making this film. It’s your first feature as a writer and director and I feel like in film culture there’s this idea that the first one should be simple and contained. And this is so refreshingly not contained and so big and you do it so well. What went into the decision to just go for it?

Fawzia: I do now understand why both financiers and directors suggest making the first feature within the confines of a world you can immediately see and understand very easily: a home, one location, four characters maybe, lots of dinner table scenes. (laughs)

In terms of whether it was a struggle, at first I definitely was trying to make this movie in the U.S. In other words, with U.S. partners, with U.S. funds, with U.S. financiers, with U.S. production companies. And we were hitting that wall that you describe. The phrase that’s often used, not just for first-time feature filmmakers but a lot, is execution dependent. Oh we love the idea and this is so interesting but it’s execution dependent. So when you don’t already have a feature to show them or when you’re not already famous or when you’re not a straight white cis man, execution dependent takes on a whole other meaning as a barrier to entry.

My wife, my producer, Andria Wilson Mirza — one of my incredible producers along with Jason Lavangie and Marc Tetreault — suggested we turn to Canada. I’m also Canadian so we started to seek out our funding through Canadian government funding, structures, and systems. It took a few years to understand and hone in on how it works, but the benefit of that system, a system that exists all over the world, is that the mission of what you are doing also matters. The person that you are matters. In other words, who are you to tell the story? The thing that I know is I am undeniable when it comes to telling queer, Muslim, South Asian stories. I’ve been telling those stories for so long. I can talk about it. I deeply know who I am and why I do this. And I do have a history of making work, if not as a feature director, as an actor, as a writer, for 13+ years. So that really helped me put forth myself and my work for this film, putting the best foot forward to find these funds and to get the support we needed.

And I don’t know! It was really cool these guys from Nova Scotia who came on board who aren’t queer, who aren’t Pakistani, but who have helped a lot of first-time female filmmakers, were just like, we’d love to help make something like this. It was refreshing to them. They were excited to put their energy and time and love and power behind something that wasn’t so contained.

We had an EP who is very experienced in putting movies together, Damon D’Oliveira, also come on board. And then it takes that first funder. I did get some money from San Francisco Film as a Ranin fellow. That helped early days. And I did a residency through 3Arts in Chicago which is an arts funding organization. And I got a grant to go write at the Djerassi residency outside the Bay which was a huge help. But the first actual money for the film came from a woman who was at CBC at the time Mehernaz Lentin. She was like, yes, here’s your first $100,000. That support unlocked a lot of other people saying yes. Like oh if she said yes then maybe we should too.

I adapted the script as well. I shifted the script to allow this funding to make sense. But I’ve got to be honest: There’s no way anyone would’ve made this movie in the U.S. They didn’t want to. And now when those same people see it they’re like oh you did it!

Drew: Yup. (laughs)

Fawzia: What are you working on next? (laughs) I guess it’s just the system we’re in.

Drew: For anyone who doesn’t know, yes, over the past 13+ years you have been prolific. As a writer and actor and as a director of shorts. To say this is your first film, honestly, feels silly. But was there anything about directing a feature that felt different from all your other work?

Fawzia: 1000%. I shadowed Ally Pankiw in 2021 on her film I Used to Be Funny and I remember realizing the stamina it requires to be able to do this every day. I also shadowed a TV show in 2022 in Nova Scotia, an hour comedy dramedy, right before I started shooting my film there and it helped me think about stamina and about who I wanted to hire on my movie. So all of those things helped. But it was a leap from what I had done up to that point to making a film that’s in two countries with two different crews and casts and languages with travel and location scouts in so many place. It really blew the world open.

I did so many things on this movie all at the same time. Stunts and rigs. The wardrobe of different time periods. The setting of time periods and what matters. Cars. The cars matter, the wardrobe and the hair matter, that’s how you really tell an audience time period. And working in a different culture. Of course I’m Pakistani and I speak the Urdu language but you’re still working in a different place and you have to know how to lead where you are. That’s really important. You can’t just be like well this is how I do it and it should apply to every place and person and culture. No, no, it’s how can you lead here, how you can inspire here, in this place with this group of people.

I learned that I can do all of this. (tearing up) You know, it’s emotional. It was a life-changing experience. I was able to bring my wife to Pakistan and introduce her to my family there. I was able to bring all these white guys! People don’t go to Pakistan for fun, so it was this life-changing thing, not just for me as a filmmaker, but for so many of us. My production designer was able to just drop in and I was like, is he Pakistani now? He was eating all the street food, hanging out with the local art teams, going wherever they go. It was seamless integration for him in a way that I’d only dreamt of being possible.

And then when sharing the film at film festivals, we had crew and producers from Pakistan who were able to get visas. Because of the attachment to a film festival, there was this possibility for these 5-10 year visas to travel to Canada, to travel to the U.S. It was deeply, deeply life-changing. Making this also prepared me where now of course I can go direct television. Oh can you handle this? Yeah we did a lot. (laughs) Yes, I can handle all the trucks and the gennies and the voices and the levels of hierarchy. It’s all okay.

As a queer person, you’re constantly having to justify who you are. You almost have to invent who you are and reinvent who you are in order to survive and thrive. I can’t discount how that work of just being someone who has had to find joy and love over the years, that personal experience, how much that has helped me be a great director.

The Queen of My Dreams is now playing in theatres.

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